Her Own Life Story Disproves Trump and Vance’s Lies
Our call this week will be at our new regular time: Friday at 11 AM Eastern.
Our guest will be Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American State Representative from Georgia.
The Uncommitted Movement pushed for her to speak on the main stage last month at the Democratic National Committee. She even released the speech she would have given. Unfortunately, she was never given the opportunity. We’ll speak about what happened at the DNC, and what the impact will be on the 2024 presidential election, especially in Romman’s home state of Georgia.
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Sources Cited in this Video
The America that Kamala Harris’ parents and Barack Obama’s father helped build.
Julian Beinart, of blessed memory.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Raphael Magarik discusses the legal movement to classify Zionism as a religious belief protected by the first amendment.
Jews make up less than one percent of Germany’s population. They make up 25% of the people cancelled for “antisemitism.”
This is how journalists should interview people like J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller, who spread bigotry for a living.
Please consider supporting a scholarship fund for displaced students in Gaza who want to study in the US.
On September 25, I’ll be speaking at Vanderbilt University. On October 29, I’ll be speaking at the University of Victoria, and on October 30, I’ll be speaking at Congregation Emanu El in Victoria.
Reader Response
In response to my video last week arguing that, when it comes to Palestine and Israel, the Biden administration values some Americans’ lives more than others, Arthur Milner disagreed.
“You say many times that the U.S. is far more concerned with Jewish-American lives than with Palestinian-American, Turkish-American lives, etc. I think you have it backwards. It’s not that Jewish-Americans matter more, it’s that Israel (“the Jewish state”) matters more. If Israel killed a Jewish-American, do you think there’d be a big fuss?”
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
So, progressives, Democrats are supposed to be happy about the results of the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Polls show that most people think that Kamala Harris won. And a lot of journalists have said, in particular, she kind of blunted the potential liability on issues like immigration that you might have faced by basically kind of luring Donald Trump into these crazy, self-involved tangents that he’s liable to go into. And I guess that’s all true. I mean I would certainly prefer Kamala Harris to do better in the debate than Donald Trump.
But there was still something that really saddened me, one particular thing about the immigration debate in that conversation and the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. And it’s this: it’s that when Donald Trump said these insanely racist things about immigrants, that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets—I mean, one would just have to say a kind of level of dehumanization that raises the specter of the worst kinds of dehumanizations of the 20th century—that Kamala Harris never spoke to the camera and said, you know what, my parents are immigrants. And they contributed a lot to this country. And we have something to thank them for, and immigrants actually make this country better.
And I wish she had spoken into the camera and spoken to people like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and said, yes, America has a lot of problems. Yes, in some ways we have become a more deeply unequal society than we were several generations ago. But you know what? It’s not because of immigrants. It’s because of plutocrats like Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which have destroyed labor unions, which have changed the tax and regulatory system to basically make it more and more rigged for people at the top. And that’s the reason that people in the kind of places that J.D. Vance grew up in, places like Springfield, Ohio, may be suffering. It sure as heck is not because Haitian immigrants are coming there.
And I wish Kamala Harris had spoken about her experience. Because she, like Barack Obama, is the child of people who came, people who worked extremely hard, who valued education tremendously, who came from the Global South—in her case, her mother from India and father from Jamaica, and in Barack Obama’s case, father from Kenya—and contributed to this country. And so much of what has made America so successful in recent decades is the extraordinary talent that has come from around the world, and particularly from poor countries in the Global South that in previous generations whose people were not allowed into the United States. And it’s sad to me. I know everyone’s supposed to just think about whether Kamala Harris did better in kind of winning over swing voters in Pennsylvania, yada, yada, yada. But it’s sad to me that when you step back and think about the broader health of America’s public discourse and kind of moral health of American society, that a Democrat, a progressive Democrat, can’t get up and say that even when she herself knows in her bones that this is true, because it’s her own story.
And I think this resonates particularly for me, because I also see it as my family story. We are coming up on coming up on the fourth yahrzeit, the fourth anniversary of my father’s death. And my parents were immigrants who came to United States as part of this kind of massive wave of post-1965 immigration. It’s true their status was a little different because they were white South Africans. But when I think back to my father, and the way his identity, so much of his identity was as an immigrant, and when I think about why he flourished so much at MIT, the university where he spent his entire life, I think it’s partly because he was surrounded by immigrants. And whether they were from whatever part of the world they were from, he felt a real kinship with these people who were coming, who were working so hard, who were sacrificing everything in order to give their children a better life, who loved America, but also could see America’s parochialism, and wanted an America that was open to the world, an America that would benefit from the things that it could learn from other societies, not just things that it could kind of instruct in some kind of imperial manner. And, you know, after my father died, and I wrote something on Twitter about him, I said that in every immigrant who loves America and challenges it, I see my father’s face.
Because when I think about those people in Springfield, yes, their circumstances may be very different coming from Haiti than my father, but I think about the deep kinship that he felt always with immigrants in the United States. And in some ways he was lucky that he did not live in an era where the backlash against immigration was as vicious and as racist as it is today. And I wish that Kamala Harris—I don’t know what her political consultants had told her, it’s not smart, that’s not what they want to hear in, you know, in Reading, Pennsylvania, or whatever, but screw it—I just wish, for the sake of our society, that Kamala Harris had been able to get up there and say, you know what? I’m the child of immigrants. My parents made this country a better place. We should be grateful to people like them. We should be grateful to the Haitian Americans in Springfield, Ohio. And the people who screwed up America, the people who have caused so much pain and agony and suffering in America. It sure as heck is not them. It’s people like Donald Trump.
What I Wish Kamala Harris Had Said About Immigrants, and Herself